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[Henning Glawe]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 12:27:51PM -0500, Tuan A. Tran wrote:
> 1) After installation, there are no users account in clients (nodes).
> I want to test lam and mpich but lam does not allow me to boot using
> root. I can't add user accounts from node because NFS mount is read
> only. I can change this one by adding write option in /etc/export but
> it seems that it is not a prefer way. Is there any way that I can add
> user account from nodes?

well, you have two possibilities here:
1) add local user accounts using adduser in the $FAI/scripts/ hierarchy; you
   may run into problems with different UIDs on the nodes when using NFS to
   copy files between them
2) use something like NIS (easy to setup) or LDAP to keep a central account
   database on some server; eventually also mount the home from there, in
   case you need shared homes. As the UID/user mappings are in a central
   database, they will be the same on all clients.
   
> 2) After installation, if I want to add a software in /usr/local, what
> should I do so that, from a nodes, I can also run the new software?

once again, you have to decide:
1) quick-and-dirty method:
   put the software as a .tar.gz on some server and unpack it in a script to
   the local disc (you can use stuff like NFS or http/ftp+wget to get the
   file to the clients)
2) sophisticated method:
   build a debian package of your software, put it into a local apt
   repository; thus you can make use of apt to (un)install or update the
   software.
   just put the package name into the $FAI/package_config/* file matching
   your class toe install it to the client.
   (we have even packaged stuff like mathematica, matlab, idl, the intel
   compilers, etc. to get them to our clients).

-- 
c u
henning